Snu Abecassis

Ebba Merete "Snu" Abecassis (born Ebba Merete Seidenfaden; 7 October 1940 – 4 December 1980) was a Danish-Portuguese publisher, who founded Publicações Dom Quixote [pt], a publishing house that became famous for publishing left-wing works, associated with ideas contrary to the dictatorship of the Estado Novo.

Snu Abecassis
Born	Ebba Merete Seidenfaden (1940-10-07)7 October 1940 Copenhagen, Denmark
Died	4 December 1980(1980-12-04) (aged 40) Camarate, Lisbon District, Portugal
Citizenship	Denmark Portugal
Occupation	Publisher
Employer	Publicações Dom Quixote [pt]
Spouse	Alberto Vasco Abecassis ​ ​ (m. 1961, divorced)​
Partner	Francisco Sá Carneiro
Children	3
Father	Erik Seidenfaden

Biography

Daughter of the Danish journalists Erik Seidenfaden and Jytte Kaastrup-Olsen [sv], Ebbe Merete was born in Copenhagen on 7 October 1940. As a child she was given the nickname Snu, which means "smart" in the Danish language.^[1]

In 1961, she married Alberto Vasco Abecassis.^[1] She moved to Portugal after a year and the couple's three children were born there.^[2] In 1965, under her direction, the publishing house Publicações Dom Quixote [pt] was founded in Lisbon.^[3] The company published both left-wing literary works and non-fiction, with a focus on those that were challenging to Portuguese political authority, or were as yet unpublished in Portuguese.^[4] It was the first to publish Pippi Longstocking and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Portugal,^[5] as well as the first to publish The Two Cultures by C P Snow.^[6]

Francisco Sá Carneiro was a Portuguese politician with whom Abecassis had an affair. She divorced her husband, but Sá Carneiro was unable to obtain a divorce from his wife. Despite this, they began to live together and also died together on 4 December 1980, in the Camarate air crash, which, in addition to Snu and Sá Carneiro, killed Adelino Amaro da Costa. The three were heading to a rally for the end of António Soares Carneiro's presidential campaign.^[7] It has been speculated that the crash was the result of an assassination attempt, but no group was prosecuted.^[8]

Cultural legacy

The film SNU was released in 2019, directed by Patrícia Sequeira; it was the second most popular national release of the year.^[9] Abecassis also featured in the series, 3 Mulheres [pt], first aired on 26 October 2018, which told the story of her life alongside that of Maria Armanda Falcão and Natália Correia.^[10]

In 2011 Cândida Pinto [pt] published a biography titled Snu, which was translated into Danish in 2013.^[11][1][12] In 2010, the final minute of Abecassis' life was the subject of a play, which premiered at the Casafez theatre in Lisbon.^[5] Published in 2003, Abecassis' mother wrote a biography of her daughter six years after her death.^[13]

Elizabeth Hera Garton hybridised an orchid and named it Snu after Abecassis.^[14]